He took the lifeline the UN had offered him — the licence to sell a little of Iraq’s huge oil reserves to buy food and medicine for his people. But he bent it to his own aims, setting out to buy influence with world politicians to try to release Iraq from the grip of sanctions.

That is one of the central claims of this week’s report by Charles Duelfer, US weapons inspector, carried out for the US Government. The Duelfer report makes allegations which are hard to verify, and its conclusions about Saddam’s subversion of the sanctions are useful for the Bush Administration. But it gives a plausible and startling account that if it had not been for the profound shock to the world on September 11, 2001, Saddam might have succeeded in his goal of shattering the sanctions.

THE SANCTIONS REGIME

In November 2001, two months after the attacks on the World Trade Centre, Saddam Hussein was riding high. His goal was in sight. Iraq was coming in from the cold. Hundreds of companies were pouring into Baghdad for the international trade fair. Businessmen and traders were flocking to the Rashid Hotel, its sandy, blast-strengthened walls concealing the marble and gilt inside.

They were walking over the mosaic of George Bush Sr, laid by Saddam after the 1991 Gulf War at the hotel’s entrance so that every visitor would deliver the former President an insult with the soles of his shoes.

Saddam hoped that within months the decade-long regime of UN sanctions would collapse. Ten years earlier, he could only dream of such a result. The UN imposed sanctions after the Gulf War to try to persuade him to disarm, and insisted on regular visits by weapons inspectors.

Almost at the same time, Western governments devised the Oil-for-Food programme. They wanted to soften the effect of the embargo on the Iraqi people. The Security Council devised its first Oil-for-Food programme in August 1991, allowing Iraq to sell small quantities of oil under strict supervision to buy relief supplies from abroad.

But it took five years before Saddam accepted a larger, more relaxed scheme. He had hoped that by broadcasting pictures of dying children he would persuade the UN to lift sanctions. But by 1996 he realised, to his fury, that “the US had a lock in the Security Council”, Mr Duelfer says.

By this point, “Iraq was in trouble,” Mr Duelfer said. “The economy was in tatters. The middle class was decimated by the collapse of the dinar.”

The moment the new scheme started, Iraq’s revenues from it shot up from $250million in 1996 to $2.76billion in 2001. The programme became the largest humanitarian project in UN history, handling $64.2billion in Iraqi oil sales and delivering $39billion of aid to 22 million people.

Saddam then conceived an ambitious plan to subvert the scheme. From the isolation of his palace he set out to buy influence with politicians who might argue Iraq’s case within the UN, and help him to overturn sanctions.

Within Iraq, he was becoming increasingly secluded for fear of detection and assassination by the US, and dealing with a tiny band of allies. But as Duelfer puts it, Saddam found the Oil-for-Food scheme “a splendid opportunity to develop influence” beyond Iraq. He played on the split in the UN between the US and UK on one side, and France and Russia on the other. By 2000, his success was visible. Banned goods and weapons “were being shipped into Iraq with virtually no problem”, Mr Duelfer said. The US was unable to block a deal between Iraq and Syria to reopen the cross-border pipeline.

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